nVidia shader patent (REYES/Raytracing/GI) destined for PS3?

[j^aws]

The present invention is related to rendering computer animated video and/or images generally, and to adjusting the origins of rays cast for object-edge positions. The present invention includes identifying a location of a vertex positioned on a perimeter of an object defined in the object scene by a plurality of vertices. The plurality of vertices include the vertex positioned on the perimeter of the object. A shading position that corresponds to, but is offset from, the vertex is then established. A shading value is then computed for the vertex by reference to the shading position. The shading value may be computed, for example, by casting a ray from the shading position.

System and method of adjusting ray origins when shading vertices with rays

I know I can't help myself, so sue me!

But with some talk of what PS3 may do prior to this nVidia announcement, this patent would be a suitable match for PS3 and CELL, no? Especially with Peter Hofstee's recent talk of physics based modelling, ray casting etc. With the importance of shading technology next gen, it's the only patent filed by nVidia that mentions REYES, ray-tracing and global illumination that I could find! Even if it's not for PS3, it's still interesting!

 

[Guden Oden]

So what exactly is it that this patent does? It's not immediately obvious for someone that isn't a graphics programmer and versed in patent legalese.

Also, what is it that it does different than other raycasting schemes that makes it patentable?

 

[London Geezer]

So what exactly is it that this patent does? It's not immediately obvious for someone that isn't a graphics programmer and versed in patent legalese.

Also, what is it that it does different than other raycasting schemes that makes it patentable?

It has more the's in the patent.

 

[nAo]

That patent is from Larry Gritz.
Mr. Gritz is an ex Pixar who founded Ex Luna. ExLuna got acquired by NVIDIA a couple of years ago. NVIDIA also settled some patents litigation between Pixar and ExLuna.
IIRC Gritz also developed BMRT (Blue Moon Rendering Tool) the first renderman compliant interface ray tracer (it used some kind of global illumination algorithm too..) who was used as ray server when PRMAN didn't supported ray tracing.
Now he's working on GELATO. That patent is about ExLuna rendering technology, now owned by NVIDIA.

ciao,
Marco

 

[Guden Oden]

Um, thanks for all the background infos, but like I said in my other post, what does it DO, exactly?

Also, I have to ask... Do you have some kind of patent fetish or something? You even keep track of who develops what for whom, and which companies sue each other and then pays the bills...

 

[London Geezer]

Um, thanks for all the background infos, but like I said in my other post, what does it DO, exactly?

Also, I have to ask... Do you have some kind of patent fetish or something? You even keep track of who develops what for whom, and which companies sue each other and then pays the bills...

He's actually a 8 headed, tentacle armed alien, plugged to the internet, and everytime the word "patent" goes through him, he wakes up and posts here.

 

[Guden Oden]

So why didn't he post when the Abdominal Chruncher was patented, huh?

 

[London Geezer]

So why didn't he post when the Abdominal Chruncher was patented, huh?

He did, in the fatgeek.com message boards.

 

[nAo]

That patent is about how efficiently merge REYES algorithm with ray tracing.
Larry Gritz started many years ago (when he worked at Pixar) to study how to improve REYES:

BMRT: A Global Illumination Implementation
of the RenderMan Standard

I'm not a patent fetish (OMG ) or an 8 headed alien, I just have a good memory and a nice list of names and terms to check on patent databases. Actually, browsing that list, it takes me 15 minutes (one check per week) to make a full scan of the interesting new patents.. 8)

 

[j^aws]

If this Sony-nVidia collaboration opens up access to these forms of patents/IPs including ones accessible through STI, I can see this being as an extremely bright and fruitfull move.

If they had a paticular direction in mind with CELL and PS3, the last thing they would've wanted was to get hindered by patents and make compromises. And this patent is a juicy one to have access to!

 

[McFly]

So they needed Nvidia for REYES? Has Pana anything to do with this?

Fredi

PS: Reading the patent now.

 

[j^aws]

So they needed Nvidia for REYES? Has Pana anything to do with this?

Fredi

PS: Reading the patent now.

Well I hate to speculate, (ahem...yeah right!) but nAo mentioned that ExLuna got bought by nVidia a couple of years ago... and when did nVidia start work on the PS3 GPU...hmm?...Maybe they could implement something from this in hardware for the PS3 GPU?

And no, Pana had nothing to do with this...

 

[Xenus]

Wouldn't the fact that Nvidia says they are making a customized version of their next generation gpu rule out REYES unless Nvidia is lying again. :?
For no matter how much better it is it has to haev an Api to stand on and of course devolopers do not like change. Thus microsoft will continue DirectX in it's direction leaving Nvidia out to dry.

 

[McFly]

Google, your best friend (or maybe not):

SANTA CLARA, CA — JUNE 13, 2002 — NVIDIA® Corporation (Nasdaq: NVDA), the worldwide leader in visual processing solutions, today announced that the graphics community—including industry luminaries, game developers, middleware vendors, digital content creation (DCC) software vendors and rendering vendors—are overwhelmingly endorsing and adopting the Cg Language and the NVIDIA Cg Toolkit, unveiled earlier today. Industry-leading DCC tool providers, including: Alias|Wavefront, Discreet, Luxology and Softimage, are actively working with NVIDIA to incorporate Cg into their current development plans. The first Cg-based offerings—primarily expected to be software plug-ins—will be available to DCC customers this summer directly within their favorite tools.

...

“Today’s gamer expects the same richness, reality and immersivity in their gameplay as they do with other entertainment media, so the pressure is on the development community to challenge their existing creative boundaries and deliver truly astounding graphics effects. Criterion has always been committed to empowering individual developers with the tools to realize their creative vision, and we fully support NVIDIA’s new Cg Compiler as a positive step towards realizing a real-time REYES/Renderman-style architecture and help narrow the gap between non-real time and real-time graphics.â€

Adam Billyard
CTO
Criterion Software

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/IO_20020612_7133.html

That was some months before Sony and Nvidia started working together. Maybe this new GPU is the hardware realistation of the software ideas they had earlier that year and Sony was the perfect partner to realise it.

Fredi

 

[Xenus]

Yes I know but the problem is the programming industry will resist radical change. They always liked to be backwards compatable and REYES wouldn't do that therefore Nvidia maybe hesitant to use it in there next generation of gpu simply because they are afraid if they take the risk no one will follow and they will be hung out to dry. It is not so much wether it is feasible or even better but will they be able to make money when they do it.

 

[McFly]

Yeah, we need more infos from Sony or Nvidia.

However:

Imagine Stream processors and REYES:

The OpenGL and Reyes rendering pipelines each render complex scenes from similar scene descriptions but differ in their internal pipeline organizations. While the OpenGL organization has dominated hardware architectures over the past twenty years, a Reyes organization differs in several important ways from OpenGL, including a shader coordinate system that supports coherent texture accesses, a single shader in the vertex stage, and tessellation and sampling instead of triangle rasterization. Hardware for the OpenGL pipeline has been well-studied, but the lack of a hardware Reyes implementation has prevented a comparison between the two pipelines. We analyze and compare implementations of an OpenGL and a Reyes pipeline on the Imagine stream processor, a high performance programmable processor for media applications. This comparison both demonstrates the applicability of Reyes for hardware implementation and exposes many issues that architects will face in implementing Reyes in hardware, in particular the need for efficient subdivision algorithms and implementations.

http://shorterlink.com/?1GNQ4F

Fredi

 

[V3]

Is it really what Sony after ?

http://film.nvidia.com/page/gelato_gallery.html

 

[j^aws]

Is it really what Sony after ?

http://film.nvidia.com/page/gelato_gallery.html

They're continually talking of movies and games integration which leads me to believe this...heck this is more plausible than if someone told you Nvidia were doing the PS3's GPU last week!

And Hofstee implies this for CELL in the video...

Peter Hofstee's gamespot CELL video

 

[Megadrive1988]

I watched the Hofstee video. extremely interesting to see someone who is at the heart of Cell's design talk about it. I could easily understand what he was saying. thanks for posting the vid.

even if PS3 does not reach 1,000 times the performance of PS2 as Sony stated in fall 1999, at least they might reach the '18,000 times PS1' performance, which was a mid-to-late 1990s desire of game developers, according to Sony.

i.e. Sony states that PS2 is 300 times the performance of PS1. therefore PS3 would only need to be 60 times the performance of PS2. unless my math is flawed again, going by Sony's figures and Sony's thinking.

 

[gurgi]

They always liked to be backwards compatable and REYES wouldn't do that therefore Nvidia maybe hesitant to use it

Except maybe in a proprietary machine that doesn't need to be backwards compatible with every hardware accelerated game on the x86 platform?.. something like, a game console? =P

Sure, they couldn't slap the tech into thier next generation PC gpu, but how many PS2s are out there again?